Potato Clock Games 2023 Powerhour

New year, new powerhour!

Visit the Potato Clock Games Low Effort Debauchery Generator to check it out. This dumb thing takes a YouTube playlist and plays a random minute of each video for a somewhat underwhelming but hassle-free powerhour experience.

Cheers!

Potato Clock Games 2022 Powerhour

The latest entry in my beloved annual powerhour series has been released. Get crunk here!

"Space Trucker Drinking Cheap Beer" courtesy of Stable Diffusion

It's just a YouTube playlist of 60 newish songs that I dug in 2022, played through my Low Effort Debauchery Generator, which takes a YouTube playlist and plays a random minute of each video for a somewhat underwhelming but hassle-free powerhour experience.

Cheers!

Sunrise Sunset Update #4

I've finally got the music in the game; took a bit longer than expected, mostly because the game is such a bloated mess. The process of testing the game, watching it crash, fixing the one line of code that made it crash & retesting takes like 5 minutes due mostly to egregious loading times. Anyway, here's the lineup (although most of the in-game versions are edited down pretty hard):

Sunrise, Sunset (performed by Anthony O'Kane)
Razorblade Alcohol Slide (DJ Qbert)
Inner Space Dental Commander (DJ Qbert)
Water Theme from Super Mario Brothers (Composed by Koji Kondo)
Testone (Sweet Exorcist)
World Music (Sifl & Olly a.k.a. Liam Lynch & Matt Crocco)
Invasion of the Octopus People (DJ Qbert)
More Than Meets the Eye (The Shapeshifters)
Laser Eyes (Sifl & Olly a.k.a. Liam Lynch & Matt Crocco)
I Don't Want to Live on the Moon (performed (& probably written?) by Jim Henson)
Sunrise, Sunset (from the 1971 film adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof)

I mean, come on. This stupid game is worth playing just for the soundtrack.

I have a lot of optimization work to do, some audio gaps to fill in, a bunch of little things. The semester's wrapping up, which means I'll be busy with school, but I'd like to have this game finished in the next couple of weeks.

Sunrise Sunset Update #3

Sound effects are finished & in the game; they're mostly either reused from other games or phoned in with my favorite video game sound effects tool, sfxr (it's free, check it out). It still ended up taking like 8 hours of work because I was an idiot when I programmed this game & totally unrelated objects are controlling each other so it was kind of a scavenger hunt finding where certain events are triggered. BORING. Anyway.

I just got started on putting the music in the game. Here's the song that plays during the opening scene:

It's such a weird & haunting interpretation, I love it. I edited it down from about 5 to less than 2 minutes but watch the video for the full glory. I'm hoping to have the rest of the music in the game within the next week, then it's on to bullshit optimization & polishing work.

Jack Ham Zero: Soundtrack Update #4 (Complete!)

The soundtrack &, with the exception of a few little details, the game itself, are finally complete. The Mp3 soundtrack will be available for download along with the game, I think that it turned out pretty well. Here's what it includes:

1. Title Theme From Jack Ham Zero
2. The AstroTurf of Destiny
3. Welcome to the Space Ham
4. 40's with George
5. Sesame Street Theme Song (Hooper Spider Mix)
6. In the Caverns of the Heart
7. Music for the Obligatory Minecart Level
8. Battle For Sainthood (Zero Mix)

It's like 20 minutes long. I mean, this soundtrack ain't no masterpiece but it's more than good enough for the game that it's accompanying. So the sounds are mixed & the bugs that I'm aware of are all squashed, just a little bit of housekeeping left. Right on track for that March 1st release.

Jack Ham Zero: Soundtrack Update #3

I ended up writing (well, arranging, I guess) two songs for the two boss battles. I'm not worried about bloating the filesize with a couple of MIDI jams & they're both kind of cop outs so don't worry, it didn't put me out anything.

The first boss battle, if I haven't mentioned this, is against Mr. Hooper of "owning the bodega in old school Sesame Street" fame. He owns the liquor store that you rob with George Washington & barfs Mr. Hooper-faced spiders at you. I reworked a MIDI version of the Sesame Street theme song that I found online to accompany this brilliant sequence. I'm happy with the song but the whole fight is still buggy as shit; I haven't really looked into the code yet to see what sort of embarrassing noob mistakes I made but that's probably the biggest non-audio job left to knock out.

For the second & final battle (against Jack Ham, of course) I threw together a MIDI version of the boss battle jam from Jack Ham's Maze of Tribulations. It took like two minutes. GOOD ENOUGH. The battle sequence itself is working fine but it's more tedious than fun so I might rework it a little. Note that I'm not super concerned with the climax of the game being more tedious than fun. You must be waiting with bated breath for this one to be released.

After throwing quite a but of shit against the wall, something's finally stuck for the cavern music. It's not quite finished but I'm really happy with it so far. So I'm'a grind through some big fixin', then finish this last jam, & I think that's all there's left to do.

Jack Ham Zero: Soundtrack Update #2

Gonna kick this one off with a sneak peek of the Jack Ham Zero title screen & this link to download the title theme:

I just finished the minecart level music & put it into the game. The music control structure (which plays/stops the various tracks at the right times) is complete & I'm sound mixin', bug fixin' & filling in the sound effects gaps as I go.

Jack Ham Zero: Soundtrack Update #1

I've finished up the title theme as well as the new version of '40's with George' & I'm really happy with both of them. The title theme is a goofy mock-metal jam, following in the footsteps of Jack Ham's Maze of Tribulations. '40's with George' is mostly just a new mix of the original version; I also made it a little bit longer & added a beepy interlude before the last chorus.

I threw together a first version of the music for the minecart levels; it's basically just a revoicing of the music for the space levels. The minecart & space levels serve similar functions in the game as weirdo action levels in between the puzzle levels, so it feels right for them to have similar music. Also, I don't want to put a whole lot of work into the minecart music; there are only 2 minecart levels, each about 1 minute long, & they're so stupid that you're actually allowed to skip the second one.

I'm thinking about making the boss jam a midi version of the title theme, which means I only have one song left to actually compose. So far so good.

Jack Ham Zero & The Return of The Zygotes

The next game I'd like to tackle is Jack Ham Zero, the riveting prequel to the second game I ever made. It's pretty much finished except for the soundtrack, & here's where that stands:

1. Title Theme: Written & recorded, just need to nail down the final mix.
2. Untitled Grass Level Jam: Complete! Er, except for the title.
3. Untitled Space Level Jam: Also complete!
4. 40s With George: This was a hidden song in the first game but I want to rework it a little.
5. Untitled Boss Jam: Does not exist yet.
6. Untitled Cave Level Jam: Does not exist yet.
7. Untitled Mine Level Jam: Does not exist yet.

Really hard to say how long this will take, maybe a couple of weeks? I expect to find some bugs & gameplay things I want to change so probably tack another couple of weeks on to that. I'll set the goal of finishing this in one month. But we'll see.

I've also got another project on my plate; Benny Lantz & I have resurrected the Zygote Intrafallopian Transfers video game. This was a project we started a quite a few years ago & was actually the reason I got into game making at all. The idea was to make a minigame for every song on our album, Sex & The Scientific Method. We only ended up making one game (Aliensexist, available at the website) before running out of steam but WE'RE BACK, BABY, making a little Castelvania-like game. I've been working on programming a respectable platforming engine while Benny's been getting his sprite on. Screenshots soon! Probably!

Music Generation in Rogue Matrix

I should be able to wrap Rogue Matrix up tomorrow, just working some kinks out of the music engine. I want to get this in good working order because the music is the only thing I really like about Rogue Matrix. It's about the simplest procedural music generation system I could think of, & ignoring some technical constraints imposed by Game Maker which I'm still working through, it's been pretty simple to implement.

It works like this. I wrote five songs, each one minute long & loopable, all in the same key & at the same BPM. Each song has 4 parts: drum, bass, harmony, melody. Once the song is written, I save each part as its own track. So I have 5 drum tracks, 5 bass tracks, etc. Then, at the beginning of a level of Rogue Matrix, the system chooses at random one of the available drum parts, bass parts, etc. & plays them all at the same time on a loop. So the drum part of song C is played with the bass part of song A, the melody of song B & the harmony of song D. Or whatever. The five minutes of music that I wrote become over 10 hours worth of possible combinations:

5 songs, 4 parts each
So when generating a song there are 5 choices for each of the 4 parts
That's 5^4 = 625 possible unique songs
The parts, & therefore the songs, are all one minute long
625 minutes = 10.4167 hours
10.4167 hours > The amount of time anyone will ever spend playing this game

I think of this as a song template; because the key & tempo are always going to be the same, songs from the same template will be pretty similar to each other. This was just an experiment; Rogue Matrix uses a single song template, but adding more is just a matter of writing the base jams. Writing those songs, by the way, is a lot fun & relatively easy; you can't be bothered with obsessing over anything because it's just going to be disassembled & frankensteined together with the other songs. I'm really looking forward to scaling this system up for some future project.